


No Occupation For A Gentleman

by shuofthewind



Series: The Making of Monsters [REMIXED] [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Actual Alley Cat Matthew Murdock, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Darcy Never Met Jane, Asshole Cat Bucky Barnes, BAMF Women, Batfamily Parallels, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Canon-Typical Violence, Darcy Adopts Many Strays, Don't Fuck With Claire Temple, Foggy Nelson Is Done With This Shit (Except Not Really Because They'd All Fall Without Him), Gen, It Started Funny And Didn't End That Way, Karen Page: Milk and Honey Warrior Queen, Odd Psychological Hoohah
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-07
Updated: 2016-03-07
Packaged: 2018-05-25 07:14:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6185494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shuofthewind/pseuds/shuofthewind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's three people all at once. He's the Soldier. He's Bucky. And all of a sudden a lawyer woman drags him out of a dumpster to get stitches, and he's Barnes. </p><p>[Or, Daredevil and Lilith acquire a new case, and his name is James Buchanan Barnes.]</p><p>[Not TPoW canon, for many reasons, but by god, was this fun. A gift for Lavanyalabelle, almost a year overdue. Bucky POV.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Occupation For A Gentleman

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lavanyalabelle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavanyalabelle/gifts).



> The title comes from a quote from Dostoyevsky's _Crime and Punishment._ Full quote:
> 
>  
> 
> _“You’re a gentleman,” they used to say to him. “You shouldn’t have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that’s no occupation for a gentleman."_
> 
>  
> 
> I know you asked for B/D/M, Belle, bb, but I couldn't fit it in properly. Both Bucky and Matt are such asshole cats that I don't think they'd feel comfortable sharing.

He snaps awake about an hour after passing out, and thinks, _fuck_.

It hadn’t been HYDRA, he thinks. He’s fairly certain it hadn’t been HYDRA, anyway. Still, the Soldier has ruined a lot of organizations over the years, and any number of them could have sent the horde of fighters after him on the New York rooftop. He can remember taking the knife in between his ribs—he presses his fingers into the hole, trying to find ruptures in his intestines, but all seems well, so he stops—but he can’t remember falling. He also can’t remember landing in the dumpster, but apparently that’s what he’s done. The lid’s down, and there’s a pool of blood on the nearest garbage bag. It smells like rot and bad Chinese food. Outside, cars are driving by. The glowing face of his digital watch says 21:39. His shirt’s soaked with blood, and there’s a swimmy feeling between his teeth that says he’s lightheaded and probably on the urge of fainting again, which is completely unhelpful.

_Fuck._

Clicking, from outside. Someone taking a shortcut down the alleyway. He can hear music. He doesn’t actually make a sound. Or he thinks he doesn’t, anyway, but the clicking stops regardless. High heels. A woman, probably. A siren screams by, and then the city fades back into its low murmur. He stares hard at the lid of the dumpster, at the crack that lets in just enough light to cast a pool of yellow over the blood on his flak jacket. _Fucking hell_.

“Hello?” says a voice. The heels click closer. “Seriously, Katie, if you’re messing with me right now, I don’t appreciate it.”

 _Who the hell is Katie_ , he thinks, but he keeps his mouth shut. The heels splash into a puddle, and then come to an abrupt stop. “Shit,” the woman says, hissing through her teeth, and then she’s crossed the alley and flung open the lid of the dumpster without any kind of ceremony. He stares at her, his eyes narrowed. The woman stares back.

 _Snap her neck_ , the Soldier says. _She’s seen you vulnerable. She’s a danger._

 _She’s just some random woman_ , Bucky tells him. _She’s trying to help._

_She’s a threat._

_She’s innocent._

_Shut up_ , he thinks at both of them, and the voices fade a little. The woman—she has dark hair and glasses and a mouth like a pin-up—frowns at him. Instead of panicking, she just looks a little exasperated, like she finds bloody men in dumpsters every other day. “This is my night off, you know,” she tells him, and she sounds so much like Natasha that for a second it could be decades ago. “I don’t need to find dying people in dumpsters on my night off.”

“Not dyin’,” he says, and reaches up with his metal hand to seize the rim of the dumpster. If he needs to, he’ll be able to snag her by the throat without too much trouble. The woman’s eyes fix on his gloved fingers, dart back up to his face. There’s something curious, rather than scared, to the way she pushes the lid back until it leans up against the brick. She looks up at the roofline, and then back down at him, scowling.

“Yeah, sure you’re not.” She reaches out and seizes his metal hand. Her lips part when she feels the chill, but other than that, she says nothing. “Come on, Not Dying Guy. There’s a lot of blood in this dumpster and I feel like people are going to be upset to find you passed out in the middle of it.”

“’m not passing out.”

“That means I don’t have to carry you, which, excellent.” She tugs. “C’mon. You’re too heavy for me to do this solo, you have to help me here.”

“Go away.”

“You want unconsciousness or you want stitches?” She makes a face at him. “I know, I know, you’re not passing out or dying or whatever, but seriously, stitches? No?”

“I’ll be fine,” he says. He’s trying not to sound as confused as he feels, but he’s not sure how well he succeeds. What the hell is going on? The woman, for some godforsaken reason, looks amused.

“That’d sound a lot more convincing if you hadn’t winced right after.”

 _I did not_ , Bucky says in the back of his head.

 _I did_ , the Soldier says. _Natural. Wounded. Repair would be a good idea._

 _She’s pretty, at least_ , Bucky says.

 _Shut up_ , he says to both of them again, and the woman yanks on his wrist.

“Stitches it is. Come on, Not Dying Guy, you have to work with me. I am not calling anyone for help on my goddamn night off.”

He twists his hand around, and snaps his metal fingers closed over her wrist. The woman goes icy still, and looks at him through her bangs like she’s contemplating how best to stab him with the pencil she has stuck in her hair. Then she relaxes, lifting one eyebrow at him in a look that’s oddly familiar. _Rebecca_ , Bucky tells him. _She kind of looks like Rebecca_.

Rebecca. Little sister. He hadn’t really remembered Rebecca before.

“You mad, bro?” she says, her eyebrow still cocked. “’cause I’m pretty sure right now you wouldn’t even be able to intimidate a kitten, pale as you are.”

He squeezes hard enough to make her flinch, and searches her face. She doesn’t have a weapon, he doesn’t think. At least, not on her. The muscles in her arm are all tense, though, and she presses her lips thin. Her eyes dart up to the roofline again, and for some reason, it eases the knot in his throat. He loosens his fingers. “Probably could intimidate a kitten,” he says, and grits his teeth. “Most likely.”

“No, you really couldn’t,” says the woman.

It takes about ten minutes to get him out of the dumpster, and another twenty (through alleys, not down main streets) before she leads him into an apartment building, ignoring the For Rent sign on the door. “Third floor,” she says, “come on,” and smacks the elevator button with a bloody thumb. The third floor brings a dark, irritable nurse—“again, Lewis? For fuck’s sake, you need to start paying me”—and a stitch job that’s quick and professional and completely silent. Neither of them ask what happened. Neither of them ask about the arm, either, though he catches the first woman, Lewis, darting little glances at the sleeve when she thinks he’s not paying attention. As soon as it’s done, the dark nurse gives him orange juice and drags Lewis away to have a whispered shouting match which ends with Lewis looking pleased and the dark nurse rolling her eyes, so he has the idea that this might be a regular thing. Then Lewis comes back to him, hands on her hips.

“So,” she says. “You wanna tell me your name?”

He weighs that for a minute or two. Then he wets his lips. He’s too out of practice with speaking.

“Barnes.”

“Okay.” Lewis tips her head at him, considering. “You’re paying to dry clean my shirt, you know. Considering it’s covered in, you know, your blood. Unless you can’t afford that.”

Barnes blinks, slowly. There is, indeed, a great big smear of blood over the side of her shirt. Over her suit jacket, too. He thinks, trying to put the memories together. He’d had people in New York outside of HYDRA, he’s fairly sure. Cleaners, fixers. The Winter Soldier had come in and out like a ghost, when he’d needed to, but he was only ever given enough tools he needed for the mission, and occasionally they’d needed repair, reuse. He knows a dry cleaner that won’t comment on bloodstains.

“Okay,” he says, and the nurse lets out a hissing breath through her teeth.

“Darcy, seriously—”

“Hey, if he’s going to pay for my clothes to be cleaned, I will not stop him, Claire Bear.” Lewis turns away. “Do you have something I can borrow until I get home?”

“I mean, sure, but—”

“You’re a peach.”

Claire the Nurse looks at them both for a moment. Then she throws up her hands, and stalks off. Barnes can’t quite make out whether Lewis is amused, or leery, or both, but it’s unsettling. She turns back to him.

“So, were you mugged?”

Barnes shrugs.

“Attacked by ninjas, then,” she says sagely. “It happens.”

 _Not in this city_ , Bucky tells him. _Unless things have changed a lot in however many years it's been._

 _Shut up_ , says Barnes.

“You need me to call anyone?” Lewis watches him as he stands, pulls the shirt that Claire the Nurse had left—too small, really, but enough to get him back to the disused safehouse—over his head. The flesh-colored glove on his arm is the wrong tone to match his skin, but if Lewis notices, she hasn’t said a word. “Only you probably shouldn’t be walking with that.”

“I heal fast.”

“Of course you do.” She mutters something under her breath—it sounds like _men are so fucking stubborn_ —and then says, “Well. At least there’s mystery in the world, still. _Random man found in dumpster with stab wound, will not explain himself_.”

“Sounds like my life,” says Claire the Nurse, and reappears to press a T-shirt into Lewis’s hands. She scowls. “You should sit down.”

“I heal fast,” Barnes says again.

“You’ll sit and heal fast until she gets back from changing,” says Claire, and shoves more orange juice at him. Lewis disappears into the bathroom to change into it. Barnes folds the bloody suit jacket up with military precision, and tucks it under his arm. Claire the Nurse looks like she wants to beat someone’s head in with a mallet.

“There you go,” says Lewis when she reappears, and he folds the shirt up, too. She cocks her head again, and then digs through her purse. “You can return it here.”

 _Nelson, Murdock and Lewis_ , says the card she gives him. _Attorneys at Law_. She’s an attorney.

 _Defense attorney_ , says the Soldier. _Civil, not criminal. You should still dispose of her._

 _Rude_ , says Bucky.

Barnes lifts the card in silence, and tucks it into the pocket of his jeans.

“Well,” says Lewis. “It was nice to go dumpster diving with you, Barnes.”

He doesn’t really have anything to say to that. So he leaves without saying anything at all.

It takes a few days before the stab wound’s fully healed. He leaves the Lewis woman’s business card sitting on top of the bundle of dry-cleaning bags for her clothes (the laundry clerk had looked at him with big eyes, stammered “we heard you were dead,” and then snapped to without any questions, which Barnes appreciates). He watches it sometimes. He really should just not do anything about it, he thinks. He should have dumped the clothes into a garbage can as soon as he’d been out of range of Claire the Nurse’s apartment, and shredded the card. He’s not entirely sure what possessed him to actually offer a name, or to respond at all. He could have heaved himself out of the dumpster eventually, made his way back to the safehouse and stitched himself up. He’s done it before, he remembers that much. But—

(— _Rebecca_ , Bucky says, and the Soldier, quietly, _she’d looked up at the roof like_ —)

—but something, he thinks. There’s something odd about the whole circumstance. Because what kind of woman, or defense attorney, or whatever it is Lewis is just finds a man with a stab wound in a dumpster and doesn’t even scream?

It takes him three days to finally bite the bullet, and heave himself back into Hell’s Kitchen.

He’d planned to leave New York days ago—it’s far too close to people he’s trying to avoid—but the puzzle keeps gnawing at him, Bucky and the Soldier and Barnes all together, and so he stays. He scopes out the law firm for a day or two more. Not a lot of clients, but there are five people who head in and out regularly, including Lewis. A blind man, who usually comes in with her. _Together,_ he thinks, watching how the man’s hand shifts to the small of Lewis’s back as they climb the stairs, the way he keeps his arm locked through hers sometimes, _probably_. A second man, blonde and round and bouncing, smiling. ( _Steve_ , someone says in his head, and he’s not sure if it’s Bucky or Barnes, if it’s James or the Soldier, he’s really not sure, but this guy looks nothing like Steve Rogers, there’s just something about the way he walks that makes him think of skinny brats with newspaper shoved into his shoes—) A blonde woman who’s probably the secretary; she takes all their calls, sits in the middle of the office with her head close to her computer. A dark woman, tall and thin, usually in sunglasses and in a lot of purple. She usually futzes with the copy machine and gets into shouting matches with the round man. The sign at the door matches the logo on the card, Nelson, Murdock & Lewis, and when he looks them all up online he finds Columbia backgrounds and a bit of heroics from the one named Murdock. They were in the papers a few months ago for taking down a crime lord named Wilson Fisk, but the name doesn’t ring a bell. He never gets close enough to hear anything they talk about, but nothing he sees at the office gives him any reason to think this is HYDRA.

He still watches them for a week before he finally comes up from ground level.

Barnes is careful to pick a time when the round man isn’t there, when the secretary’s off for lunch and the girl in purple hasn’t shown up yet. The blind one isn’t there either, though he’s fairly sure that the man will show up in the next ten minutes or so. It shouldn’t take him more than five to go in and out, Barnes thinks. He knocks on the door.

“We’re not open at the moment,” says Lewis through the glass. “Apologies. If you could come back in twenty minutes—”

He clears his throat. He hasn’t spoken since he left Claire the Nurse’s apartment. “It’s Barnes.”

Silence from inside the office. Then the door unlocks, and Lewis is standing there in heels and a suit coat. Her hair’s down this time. It curls. _Rebecca_ , Bucky tells him again, and the Soldier shuts him up. “Well,” she says after a moment. “You sure took your time with this one.”

“Recovering,” he says, and offers the bags. Lewis takes them, and folds the clothes over her forearm. “Didn’t mean to make you wait.”

“Uh-huh,” she says, and she’s amused again, for reasons he can’t make out. “Didn’t think I’d ever see this shirt again. Which, score, because I like this shirt.”

Barnes shoves his hands into his pockets. “Said I’d return it.”

“And so you have.” She eyes him for a moment. “You want coffee?”

 _Bad idea_ , the Soldier tells him. _Poison_.

 _For God’s sake_ , says Bucky, _you’re so paranoid_.

“Sure,” says Barnes, and steps in through the gap. Lewis shuts the door behind him, and pads off into the kitchenette to mess with the coffee machine. Even in heels, she’s a soft walker.

“So,” she says, once the coffee press is doing its work. “You gonna tell me whether or not it was really ninjas that left you in that dumpster?”

Barnes tips his head at her. His hair falls in his eyes. Lewis crosses her arms over her chest and doesn’t look away from the coffee press, drumming her fingers like an impatient housewife. When a full thirty seconds goes by, she peeks at him through her hair.

“You do the silence thing pretty well,” she says. “Are you a professional Creepy Staring Person?”

Something catches in his throat. “A professional what?”

“Creepy Staring Person,” she says again. “Like in mob movies where there’s always the one guy who—” she stops, and starts again. “You know, the one guy who stands there and looks intimidating while the prisoner pees themselves. Is that you?”

He’s fairly sure the thing snagging in his mouth is something like a cough, and it’s irritating. “No.”

“No, or not anymore?”

“No,” says Barnes again. He’d usually been the one doing the hurting.

“What do you do, then?”

“I’m in asset recovery,” he says, and Lewis purses her lips and cocks her head at him. There’s a scar on the back of her left hand. _Knife wound_ , says the Soldier. _Someone stabbed her_ , says Bucky. Barnes is more uncomfortable with both of those observations than he likes.

“What kind of assets?”

Barnes shrugs. “Many kinds.”

“Recovery for who?”

“Mostly myself.”

She scowls. “That’s horribly vague and I don’t like it.”

He shrugs again. Lewis watches him until the timer goes off on the microwave, and then turns to mess with the coffee press again.

“Fine,” she says under her breath, “be that way.”

Barnes watches her make coffee for a minute, and then slinks off to investigate the office.

Lewis doesn’t object to him picking over the top of the secretary’s desk, or peering into either of the offices. There are two desks crammed into the one that usually has the curtains drawn, and he’s pretty sure she shares this one with Murdock, since he can’t remember seeing either of them in the other office for more than a few minutes at a time. There’s a whiteboard set into the wall with writing on it that he can’t make out, a bunch of acronyms that could mean something dangerous but probably only have to do with the legal files left on the messier desk. The clean desk has to be Murdock’s, he thinks, since the man’s blind. The other office, what has to be Nelson’s, looks like a bomb went off inside. He avoids it. By the time he’s done snooping, Lewis (who still looks amused, which is irritating him now, because why the hell is this so amusing) has two mugs of coffee. She offers him the one she’s holding with her scarred hand.

“I figured you don’t do sugar or milk or anything,” she says. “And I thought about strychnine, but I decided against it.”

The Soldier goes still. Bucky goes still. Barnes freezes, and searches her face. Her eyebrows lift again as if to say, _aha, caught you_ , and she takes a deliberate sip of the coffee she’s offering him before holding it out again. Barnes takes it carefully in his flesh hand, and doesn’t do anything else with it.

“If you’re waiting to see if I die it might take a while,” she says. “Poison doesn’t act as fast as it does in the movies.”

He knows that. He doesn’t say that, but he knows that. “Something’s wrong with you, I think.”

“People tell me that all the time.” She grins at him. “So? Recovering what kind of assets?”

“None of your business,” says Barnes.

“Rude.”

Bucky’s pleased, though for some obscure reason of his own that Barnes can’t quite make out. It’s obnoxious. It’s almost Bucky who says, “Sassy, then.”

“Little bit.” The door opens, and Lewis perks up, the smile turning a little quieter, a little curvier, when the blind man, Murdock, pauses on the threshold. “There you are.”

“Angela was late,” he says. There’s something icy in how he’s holding himself as he shuts the door, folds both hands around his cane. “Did I hear voices?”

“You did.” She crosses to stand next to him, presses the second mug of coffee into his hand. “Matt, this is Barnes. I found him in a dumpster. Barnes, this is Matt Murdock, my legal partner.”

Murdock still hasn’t unfrozen. His head’s cocked, his hands are still, and he’s…Barnes isn’t quite sure what he’s doing other than listening, but it has the hair on the back of his neck rising and the Soldier coming to attention. _Predator_ , he thinks. And Murdock’s mouth thins like he’s thinking the same thing. _Predator_.

“Gentlemen,” says Lewis. She puts her hand on Murdock’s arm, and he unsticks. And that’s even more fascinating, because Lewis is tiny and odd and harmless so far as Barnes can tell—though there are some little habits that remind him of Natasha, something in how she walks and how she looks up at the rooftops like she’s searching for snipers, and that might be why he’d agreed to go with her in the first place, now that he thinks about it, because he’d seen that little habit and absorbed it without thinking and registered her as safe haven because of it—but she puts her hand on Murdock and Murdock steadies out. He doesn’t relax, exactly—he still looks ready to come at Barnes without hesitation, if he has to—but he steadies, and tucks his chin in closer to his chest. A warning, Barnes thinks. Or a leash. “Can we keep it civil, please? Barnes is only here for a few minutes. He just came to drop something off.”

“I don’t have anything else to do,” Barnes says, still watching Murdock. _Irish name_ , Bucky tells him. _Lots of Irish blood in Hell’s Kitchen_. The Soldier hums, thoughtfully. “I could stay, if you want me.”

“That’s cute,” says Lewis, her mouth curling. “But I think we’re good. What do you do all day when you’re not terrorizing harmless kittens, anyway?”

Barnes shrugs. There’s not really any answer he can give that wouldn’t be completely outlandish. “I think a lot.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“What were you dropping off?” says Murdock, in a light, casual voice that means absolutely nothing. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“He bled on my jacket.” Lewis shrugs. “I made him have it dry cleaned.”

“Ah,” says Murdock. “The one with the mugging.”

“A possible mugging,” Lewis says. Her hand’s still on Murdock’s arm. “Barnes is being kind of snotty about telling me what happened. Barnes, you good? Or are you gonna get lost going down the stairs?”

“Think I’m good,” says Barnes. When he steps closer to them, Murdock’s shoulders go all tense again, and Lewis swipes her thumb over the back of his forearm. “I’ll call you.”

“You do that.”

He shuts the door, and waits by the glass for a moment, but all Murdock says is, “You meet interesting people, Darcy,” and changes the subject as they wander into another room.

.

.

.

He’s still in New York a month later, and he still hasn’t worked out what’s bothering him. It’s not as though he’s staying just because he can’t figure out what the deal is with Nelson, Murdock & Lewis. There are pockets of HYDRA affiliates all through the city, and plus there’s the gaggle of men who stabbed him on the rooftop to deal with. He finds them one by one, snaps them once through the neck with a sniper rifle or cuts their throats in the dark, trying to work out if they’re from HYDRA, or the Hand, or the Red Room, or someone else entirely. He deals with the bodies the same way he’s always dealt with bodies; he leaves them there as a warning. Sometimes he stalks around Hell’s Kitchen daring someone to come after him, but no one does. The longer he stays in this part of the city, the more he hears about the vigilantes. They don’t kill, just incapacitate, and there’s something in the Soldier that looks down on them for that. There’s something in Bucky that wants to congratulate them.

 _Daredevil,_ says the papers. _Hawkeye,_ though not the Hawkeye that works upstate with the Avengers, a different Hawkeye, a woman. And another woman, _Lilith._ Hell’s Kitchen has a preponderance of people who like to stalk around in the middle of the night. It’s why he’s surprised it takes him so long to run into even one of them.

It’s the woman with the bow, first. Hawkeye. He spies her a few rooftops over, a sniper like him, arrow drawn back to her ear, waiting. He doesn’t draw attention to himself. He just watches as she stands there, as she waits, the string taut, her whole body still, breathing in and out just like a trained assassin. Barnes almost jumps when she looses the arrow. When he looks down at the ground, there’s a man pinned to the wall by the back of his shirt, and a crackle of electricity from another dark figure in the alley. Hawkeye puts a hand to her ear, says something Barnes can’t make out, and then drops down from the edge of the roof onto the fire escape, another arrow already on the string. He turns, and walks away. It seems like they have it in hand.

The second time it’s Daredevil, and he’s really not sure how the man noticed him, since he’s settled in the window of his safehouse, six floors up and with the glass pulled closed. He looks out, and he sees a dark figure on the opposite rooftop, standing and staring at his apartment. Barnes stares back. When the clouds break, and moonlight hits the horns, he thinks, _Predator._ His heartbeat is low and far away, steady in his ribs. Then Daredevil turns and walks away, saying nothing, leaving nothing behind. Barnes carries another firearm tucked into his boot, after that, matching the knives and the semiautomatic hidden in the small of his back.

He doesn’t try to track them. He doesn’t try to get in their way. They’re doing something to protect people, he thinks. He could funnel news of them to the Avengers, using channels he’s long since abandoned, moles he hasn’t spoken to in months, but he decides against it. Barnes is fairly sure that none of them would quite fit in with what Rogers and Wilson and Romanoff ( _Natasha_ , he thinks, and it’s Barnes that thinks it, the Soldier and Bucky and James and Barnes all at once, _Natalia_ ) are trying to do upstate. That, at least, he can understand.

He doesn’t run into Lilith until a good month and a half after Lewis uncovers him in an alley dumpster.

He’s fighting. The men—they’re from Stryker, he’s learned, for some reason, he can’t remember Stryker but some of the files he’s found during his crawls through HYDRA bases say that he’d done some work for the man, twenty years ago, more—who’d come after him that first night have finally worked up the nerve to try again, and there are five of them, which wouldn’t be a problem if one of them hadn’t used an EMP to disable his arm. He hasn’t had the chance to wrench the little thing off the metal, yet, which means he’s fighting one bladed and trying his damnedest not to get shot in the back of the head when there’s a flicker of movement, and a snapping pop, like static but stronger. When Barnes flips the blade, catches it, and slashes backhanded at the next man’s face, there’s a small, curvy woman with dark hair and a mask snapping down into a low, spiraling kick that has a second man knocked off his feet.

Between them it only takes a few minutes. The ones that Lilith puts down are left alive. The ones that Barnes puts down are breathing, at least. He has the feeling that if he kills them in front of Lilith, she’ll be angry, and he’s not entirely sure he wants to fight her. Blood’s dripping off his knife when she hooks her hair back—her mask covers most of her face, except her mouth, two small slits for her eyes—and says, “Do things always get this exciting around you?”

She drawls. _Southern states_ , says the Soldier. _Georgia_. Bucky says, _She knows her way around a brawl, at least_. And Barnes thinks, _well, now I can say I’ve seen all three_.

“Sometimes,” he says after a moment, and Lilith’s mouth quirks. Her lipstick isn’t arterial, but gut-blood red, dark and deadly.

“Sometimes, he says.” She looks at his knife, and then slips her taser back into the holster on her leg. Her lips thin out. “Keep killing people in my city, and we’re gonna have a problem.”

Barnes meets her eyes. This one’s a predator too, he thinks. Like Daredevil. Not a sniper like Hawkeye, but someone who sinks their nails in up to the roots and tears. “They tried to kill me first,” he says.

“Don’t care.” Lilith looks down at the unconscious bodies. “This is your only warning. You keep killing, we come after you. Is that understood?”

Barnes doesn’t blink. He just watches her. Lilith stares back. There’s a twist to her mouth, like she’s disappointed. Then she looks up at the line of the roof. When Barnes looks up too, Daredevil’s standing on the sixth floor fire escape, watching them. He doesn’t move. Hawkeye’s there too, another level up, and she has an arrow to her string. When Barnes looks back to Lilith, she’s watching him.

“They both think we should put you in custody,” says Lilith. “Though none of us are sure you’ll actually stay there.”

Barnes says nothing. That’s obvious enough to anybody, he thinks.

“I don’t think you’re a bad man,” says Lilith, “which is why we’re giving you this one chance. You stop killing. You end this without one more death. I don’t know who it is you’re fighting, or what it is you’re running from, but nobody else dies. Do you understand me?”

He considers that for a long time. There’s blood on his lips, and he can taste it on his tongue.

“I don’t kill them,” he says, “I end up dead.”

“Then find another way,” says Lilith, shortly. “Don’t much care what.”

He’s fairly sure it’s Bucky and not Barnes or the Soldier that says, “I don’t know another way.”

Lilith’s lips part. She swallows. Her eyes are green, he thinks. “One more body drops,” she says, “and we’ll know where to look.”

She turns her back on him, then, and walks away. He doesn’t put his knife into her spine. He really should, he thinks, watching her go. But he doesn’t, because there’s something familiar about that mouth.

 _Predator_ , he thinks.

The next morning, he shows up at Nelson, Murdock & Lewis at five minutes before nine, and knocks on the door. It opens without comment, not to Lewis (which he’s irritated about) but to Nelson, who stops dead and stares at him like a Pekingnese who’s just been confronted by a wolf. He swallows, visibly, and his eyes flick to Barnes’s arm before he clears his throat.

“Well,” Nelson says. “You are…not who I expected.”

“Foggy,” says the blonde secretary. Page, says the name on her desk. Karen Page. “Darcy mentioned him. Let him in.”

Nelson purses his lips. He’s frightened, Barnes thinks, but he’s still standing his ground, and all at once there’s _c’mon, Buck_ and newspapers and _hey, Aunt Sarah_ and a million other things pressing into his head that make him think of things years and years gone. Thankfully, Nelson shifts back out of the way before Barnes can do more than heave a breath, and as soon as the eye contact breaks, so do the memories. “Welcome to my place of employment,” he says. “Please don’t break things or kill people.”

“ _Foggy_ ,” says the secretary again, but Nelson just retreats to stand with his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes fixed on Barnes, unmoving. Page hooks her hair behind her ears, watching him. She’s not frightened, Barnes thinks. She ought to be, but she’s not.

“Darcy and Matt should be back in a bit," she says. "If you want to wait.”

Barnes clears his throat, and then settles in the chair near the potted plant. Page waffles for a moment, and then goes to make coffee. It’s much stronger than Lewis’s was, and reminds him of something burned, but it snaps him out of the spiral of memories, at least.

“Sorry,” says Page. “My coffee’s generally kind of bad.”

Nelson scoffs.

Barnes doesn’t respond to this. He just drinks it, and waits.

Lewis and Murdock appear in the doorway within twenty minutes, long after Page has given up trying to ask him inane questions and gone back to her work on the financial papers. They step through the door, and Murdock’s all coiled, waiting to pounce. Lewis looks at Barnes for a breath, and then says, “Well, hey there, stranger.”

 _You’re a lawyer and a vigilante_ , he thinks. It’s one of the most ironic things he’s heard that he can remember. Somehow. Murdock’s settled and waiting for him to say something, Barnes thinks. _Like I know what you are_. Or _Are you Lilith and Daredevil?_ Or something else entirely. Barnes just clears his throat.

“I told you I don’t know any other way,” he says. “If I stop running, then I’ll end up dead.”

Murdock doesn’t say anything. Behind the secretary’s desk, Karen Page is watching them with eyes like reflecting pools. Lewis looks up at Murdock for a moment, and touches her fingers to his arm again. He thinks it might be in a question. Then she turns to Barnes.

“Come into the office,” she says. “You need to start at the beginning.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm...not entirely sure they'd react so calmly to this, but this is what the narrative demanded, so if it's a little OOC, I'll take it.


End file.
